1
ANNUAL PLANNING FOR STARTUPS
How To Identify Gaps,
Decrease Churn and
Maximize Opportunities
This is your ultimate guide to optimizing and aligning your budgeting process across
pre-sales, sales, marketing, revenue operations and customer success.
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
2
Table of
Contents
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
05
Introduction
11
Chapter 1
Sales and Pre-Sales Annual Planning
25
Chapter 2
Marketing Annual Planning
49
Chapter 3
Customer Success Annual Planning
71
Chapter 4
Tying it all together
87
Contributors
4
5
Introduction
David Maxey
Head of Revenue Operations
In the fast-paced world of SaaS businesses, every
department plays an important role in the journey to achieve
lasting and efficient growth. Whether you work in pre-sales,
sales, marketing, or customer success, creating and following
an annual plan that tracks progress with data-driven insights
is vital.
When it comes to pre-sales and sales, it’s not just about hiring
salespeople. In this playbook, we’ll explore four key drivers that
go beyond that: ramp time, average selling price, sales cycle,
and conversion rates. These factors are essential in boosting
your sales team’s performance and driving revenue growth.
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
Introduction
6
7
Moving on to marketing, it’s all about scalability. We’ll look at
four main drivers that contribute to scalable growth:
^
the right staffing for lead generation,
^
monthly budget allocation,
^
strategic, consistent messaging, and
^
channel analysis to accurately forecast and make informed
decisions about marketing activities.
We’re also giving customer success its own chapter in this
ebook because it has its own set of drivers that are different
from sales and marketing. We’ll look at how the customer
success team can strike a balance between meeting client
needs and maintaining profitability, how to integrate cross-sells
and upsells to maximize revenue, and how to use health scoring
to assess the well-being of each account.
In the final chapter, you’ll learn how annual planning across
the company can work to identify gaps, decrease churn and
maximize opportunities. We’ll share how keeping a close eye on
company-wide metrics like cost of customer acquisition, lifetime
value and magic ratio can help you find new opportunities for
growth as well as anticipate problems before they happen.
We think this playbook is your ultimate guide to optimizing your
budgeting process across pre-sales, sales, marketing, and
customer success. By understanding the drivers of sustained
and efficient growth in each area, you’ll have the power to make
data-driven decisions and adapt your strategies to reach your
business goals.
So, let’s get started on this journey of effective budgeting for
sustainable SaaS growth. Get ready to unlock the insights and
tools you need to thrive in the world of SaaS.
Let’s do this!
Introduction
Introduction
8
This eBook is
brought to you
by RevGenius,
Harmonize and
Sigma Computing.
9
GTM Harmony delivers Harmonize: SaaS service
designed to assist Founders, CEOs, and GTM leaders
by providing them with the vital GTM metrics they need
to make informed decisions.
After an initial consultation to understand their current
state and goals, our software integrates into their CRM,
pulling actual data and recalculating models monthly to
ensure up-to-date and accurate projections.
Sigma is a cloud-native analytics platform using
a spreadsheet-like interface that empowers business
users to collaborate and make data-driven decisions
through self-service business intelligence. Sigma
requires no code or special training to augment with
new data, perform “what-if” analysis in real-time,
and answer natural language questions.
Through the modern intelligence cloud, at Sigma we
empower everyone to data confidently.
Introduction
Introduction
10
CHAPTER 1
Sales and
Pre-Sales
11
There are two ways to approach annual planning: Bottoms-Up
and Top-Down.
^
Bottoms-Up forecasting starts with people and
ends with a top-line revenue target.
^
Top-Down starts with a revenue target and fits
people into this target.
This chapter provides insights into how companies can
strategically align their efforts to drive sales growth while
maintaining operational efficiency.
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
The Bottoms-Up approach focuses on establishing goals
for existing, recurring growth, while the Top-Down approach
centers on setting targets and devising strategies to achieve
them. Integrating these approaches provides C-level
executives with valuable insights into aligning goals with
achievable strategies.
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
12
Sales and Pre-Sales:
Staffing & Leads
For pre-sales and sales, the main focus is ensuring that you
have enough Account Executives to cover the revenue targets
and that those Account Executives have enough SDR and/or
Solution Engineering support to cover the pipeline needs.
The secondary focus is marketing, which typically gets
less attention. You want to make sure marketing is bringing
in enough leads to support the sales targets. Ideally, your
marketing and sales leaders work together to decide what
portion of the pipeline will be covered by marketing versus
sales outreach. (We’ll touch on marketing in the next chapter).
When you look at both Marketing and Sales, it appears that you
don’t have much to move around besides the hiring dates of the
people needed to execute. And that’s mostly true. But there are
additional four levers that pre-sales and sales can access.
Ramp Time
It’s essential to quickly ramp up your account executives and
SDRs (and Sales Engineers, if needed) to deliver revenue. To do
that, you can focus on sales enablement, set hiring dates, create
training plans, and strategically configure the pre-sales team.
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
13
However, ramp time is commonly overlooked. If your company
doesn’t have someone dedicated to sales enablement –
specifically, getting the sales department selling – then you
can’t expect incremental improvement. Imagine being able
to train a sales representative 20% faster! The impact on
productivity numbers, when you will hire, and what size team
can’t be emphasized enough.
However, it’s essential to maintain a realistic perspective while
evaluating and enhancing these. Ramp times are influenced
not only by the skills of your sales team but also significantly by
the length of your sales cycle, the effectiveness of your hiring
process and your capacity to attract top talent possessing
industry or ICP knowledge.
In addition, you should consider if you have enough Solution
Engineers. You may find that it takes longer than expected to
train AEs and / or SDRs on a complex product. If so, it’s time
to look at hiring your first solution engineer. A solution engineer
that is adept at speaking to clients about product complexity
can be deployed to the portion of prospects that need it while
your SDRs are trained to be much faster and scalable. Training,
efficient hiring plans, and having the right support are critical to
decreasing ramp time.
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
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15
Average Selling Price
Go Up-Market
What about the Sales Team? They can impact average selling prices
by uncovering additional value drivers for prospects, negotiating
price increases and looking for up-market opportunities.
Lastly, “going up market” is a plan that many companies strive to
achieve, but often find challenging. When you go up market, all
of the numbers for an annual plan appear better, the productivity
looks healthy and the business can scale exponentially. All
of this is what every business wants, but going up market is
hard work. If you started at the lower end of the market, going
upstream is a major change that will likely require resources your
company does not have from a hiring standpoint. For example,
your company would probably have to hire an entirely different
sales team to support significantly larger prospects and selling
cycles. Also, venturing into an upmarket segment necessitates
significant product development. However, with investment,
patience, and a solid up-market strategy, this could be a viable
way to increase the average selling price.
You can only expect to sell more if you provide more value.
This sometimes means more features or functionalities, but
also may be a different persona or market segment that values
your products or services more. Honing in on the portion of the
market that provides your sellers the highest selling price is
a reliable way to drive up the average selling price.
Price Increases
Another avenue may be price increases. This can be a lot harder
depending on your customer’s usage. When approaching
renewals, keep in mind that reasonable price increases should
not drive away your customers - provided they can’t live without
your product. But be careful. This can also make them consider
your competitors. When trying to increase prices on new
business, the main objective is not to price yourself out of the
market. A competitor with a similar offering and value is not a
competitor you want to try and beat on price alone.
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
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Compressing the Sales Cycle
a linear sales process in place to measure the time
between stages. Adding to this, the buying process
and timeframe should largely be driven by the buyers
themselves; nobody wants to be sold through a process,
but they do want to buy. The balance here is to make sure
the prospect isn’t rushed through the process of buying
while also making sure to minimize wasted time.
You may be thinking, “OK, but maybe I can shorten the sales
cycle to increase deal flow.” It’s a great idea but it has to be
done in a sustainable fashion.
Here are a few ways to do that:
^
Find segments that will buy faster
To find a segment that will buy faster, you have to identify
the buyer’s pain point that can be solved very quickly and
that has an extremne impact. It works when time passing is
painful for the prospect and there is no cheaper competitor
they could go with instead. If your prospect isn’t in a hurry
to buy, this isn’t going to work. Your product either can’t
create urgency this way or the wrong ideal client profile
(ICP) has been targeted. Consider data analysis by using
pattern recognition in deals with shortened time to close.
^
^
Eliminate friction in the buying process
(online payments and digital signing)
Eliminating friction can be as simple as putting your
contract into a digital signing platform and accepting any
form of payment possible. Make it easy to sign and easy
to pay. This can shave off days and sometimes weeks off
of the sales cycle. You can accept checks, credit cards,
PayPal, ApplePay, etc.
Measure milestones in deals and find what
steps can be compressed
Measuring milestones allows you to understand the
duration of each stage, if it’s necessary for the sales cycle,
and if it can be compressed and or eliminated. Using
timestamps in Salesforce is the easiest way to analyze this
(you can use history reports, but they are a pain). This
also assumes you are using best practices and have
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
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Improving conversion rates
Employing tracking and governance strategies are key to
improving conversion rates.
Lastly, find your industry average and make sure that you aren’t
trying to get a higher conversion rate than what is typical. If
you’re already closing 70% of the deals that are in the sales
cycle, then you should focus on a different area to improve.
Here are a few steps to follow:
^
Align your funnel to forecastable stages
^
Create reports that use these definitions
^
Channel conversion rates vs People
Conversion rates should be calculated weekly
Conversion rates
and monthly using channel conversion rates and people
conversion rates. Channel conversions are
calculated using only the channel that carried the lead
along the prospect journey. Focus on the source
and who worked the lead. When you break it out this
way, certain people will be better at converting from
different channels. This allows you to focus people on
the channels that work for them and not assume your
best channel works the same for your entire sales team.
(This is almost never the case). Enabling sales
people to focus on what works for them will allow you
to improve your conversion rates for each person and
channel, which improves the overall conversion rate.
^
Design Dashboards that instantly update
It’s very important to align the teams responsible for the
prospect funnel, namely Marketing and Sales. This alignment
will ensure conversion rates can be monitored and improved.
While every stage in the funnel doesn’t need to be tracked, it
makes sense to monitor specific stages for conversion rates to
be forecastable.
For example, if all lead stages were tracked, daily conversion
rates from each stage would vary wildly depending on the
amount of traffic, day of the week, and other factors. Using data
that fluctuates too much will give false signals on what is
working and what is not, making it nearly impossible to forecast.
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
PRO TIP
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
20
Key Takeaways
When you focus on average deal size, sales cycle and
conversion rates, the operational side can provide a lot of
valuable input. By improving average deal size, sales cycle,
and conversion rates, you are essentially making sales a force
multiplier, allowing your team to do more, with less people.
This level of transparency also allows better and more cogent
conversations with the other parts of the business. If something
isn’t working, you can initiate more productive conversations
about the assumptions that caused the disconnect. Perhaps
you didn’t hire enough people, set your conversion rates too
high, weren’t able to sell your average price or the sale took
a lot longer than anticipated.
21
Additional resources:
Article
6-Activity Framework for Sales
& Marketing Alignment
Read Now
Article
Customer Churn in B2B:
The Recurring Revenue Killer?
Read Now
Webinar
Scaling Your Sales Team
– When and How
Watch Now
Webinar
Annual Planning for RevOps Teams
Watch Now
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
22
Using Data in RevOps
Presented by Sigma
23
The one thing we do differently in Sigma is we have a feature
that allows you to enter your own data and context, and it writes
it back to the cloud data warehouse. That’s a game changer
because it kicks off a two-way connection with the data, which
isn’t possible in other business intelligence platforms.
In revenue planning and operations, you need to be able to
answer any question in the business within 60 seconds. Your
job is literally to see it coming.
When you’re working as CRO or in RevOps, the most important
thing is to make sure you have access to literally all of the data,
that it’s not an extract, and that it’s live. There shouldn’t be a
single time you can’t get access to the data you need. Make
sure to look at the lowest level of detail. For example, you might
have a sales rep whose productivity is higher than the rest —
maybe they are closing 7% higher than the industry average.
Is there something that person is doing uniquely that we can
see in the data, that we can then repeat to other areas of the
business? What can I go change and see that then rolls up to
bigger wins for the business? That line of thinking goes across
any data point and any workflow in the business.
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
Source: Sigma Computing
Sigma is a cloud-native analytics platform using a spreadsheet-like interface that
empowers business users to collaborate and make data-driven decisions through
self-service business intelligence.
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
24
CHAPTER 2
Marketing
This chapter presents best practices to improve marketing
efficiency and facilitate planning and budgeting processes.
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
25
In Chapter 1, we covered pre-sales and sales and identified
which levers increase efficiency beyond hiring more people.
In this chapter, we’ll explore marketing planning and how to
avoid a few pitfalls.
Everyone wants to know whether marketing is bringing in
enough quality leads to support the sales targets. To answer
this question, sales, marketing, and customer success (CS)
must work together. We’re including CS because that team can
play an important role in turning customers into advocates.
(We’re defining “advocates” as referenceable customers).
Chapter 2: Marketing
26
27
Here are some best practices that will improve marketing
efficiency as well as ease the planning and budgeting processes.
^
Staff up for the number of leads needed and be
ready to pivot
^
Secure monthly program budgets
^
Ensure messaging continuity between pre-sales,
sales, marketing, and customer success
^
Differentiate between Channel Diagnostics
vs. Channel Forecast
^
Secure a budget for large investments needed
Map Lead Requirements to Channels
Based on Part 1, you’ll be able to determine how many SDRs
and Account Executives you need. You’ll also have a good
sense about the number of the required leads, (derived from
conversion rates by channel, sales cycle, and average deal
size). With these calculations, you can start moving from the
bottom of the funnel to the top using simple math.
Once you have the number of leads you need, the marketing
director will figure out which channel will produce that number
of leads, using rough percentages as a starting point to allocate
budget. Typically, you’ll want a dedicated manager for any
channel producing 50% or more of the leads you expect,
depending on your specific business.
The goal is to map the lead requirements to
channels and allow the channel managers to
build detailed monthly program plans to hit
those targets.
Those plans should include monthly program budgets as well.
The marketing director will determine the number of people
required to execute these programs, keeping in mind budget
constraints. To achieve the desired number of leads, think
about the best combination of channels each month, while
optimizing program costs.
Chapter 2: Marketing
Chapter 2: Marketing
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Be Ready to Pivot
You will discover that a channel you believed would be
wildly successful turns out to be disappointing. In this case,
you need to pivot. Getting to the bottom of why a channel
wasn’t successful is critical. What changed? Was the original
hypothesis wrong or do things need more time
and some tweaks?
In other words, adapt and change direction from
data based insights.
It’s crucial to have hiring managers with experience in diverse
channels to ensure a smooth transition and avoid skill set gaps.
To bridge such gaps, you have two options: provide training or
make new hires.
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Ensure Cohesive and Consistent
Communication with Prospects
& Customers
Marketing is usually the first contact a prospect has with the
company (outside of cold outreach). This is fine as long as there
is a system in place where the marketing interaction ends and
a pre-sales person puts the prospect into an automated cadence
or sequence. If this doesn’t happen, prospects get emails from
your marketing system and the SDRs at the same time. This
should be avoided because the prospect may be turned off by
over communication. For example, if the lead doesn’t respond
to an SDR and after a certain time, they are removed from the
prospecting system and then moved back into a nurture stream
that is managed by the marketing automation system.
To ensure consistent and cohesive
It’s simply unrealistic to expect someone with
communication with customers, it’s important
no experience in social channels to generate
to consider the use cases of prospecting
a substantial number of leads if their expertise
automation software for customer success.
lies primarily in areas like paid digital ads.
In some cases, marketing activities like sending newsletters
and product updates may not be aligned with customer
success efforts. This can lead to customers receiving multiple
emails within a short span of time, lacking a sense of continuity.
Chapter 2: Marketing
Chapter 2: Marketing
30
To address this, it is crucial to map out the entire journey from
prospect to customer (and eventually to advocate). By doing
so, you can identify the systems involved in communicating
with the end user and orchestrate the messaging at each stage.
This ensures that the communication remains consistent
and aligned throughout the customer’s experience.
Channel Diagnostics
vs. Channel Forecasting
When diagnosing a channel, you want to know the conversion
rate for that channel and any sub-channels (e.g. a channel may
be a social platform, and a sub-channel would be Facebook
vs. Instagram, specifically). You also want to know the
conversion rate of each person responsible for working and
closing those leads.
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system, whereby the leads the representatives are most likely
to close will be routed mostly to them. (We say mostly because
you also want your lead follow-up time to be extremely fast
and sometimes that means routing a lead to someone that is
available rather than an expert).
Tools like Chilipiper can make this performance-based routing
easy to set up and maintain, assuming you regularly use
channel diagnostics. When you are channel forecasting, use the
blended conversion rate from the top level channel to forecast
the number of expected leads. This differs from channel
diagnostics because you are more focused on predicting which
leads will come in than how to increase your conversion rates.
Calculating the channel and sub-channels is pretty
straightforward if you have an attribution system in place. When
calculating conversions for people, it’s useful to ignore channels
in the initial analysis and find out which leads each account rep
is closing the most and then move on to which channel sourced
the lead. The full analysis should tell you which channels close
at the highest rate with each sales representative. This will allow
you to provide feedback to create a performance-based routing
Chapter 2: Marketing
Chapter 2: Marketing
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REMEMBER
If you are trying to
increase conversion
rates, you need all
the details you can
get, but if you are
forecasting, you can
use top-level channels
and historical data.
33
Channel Diagnostics and Forecasting:
An In-Depth Analysis
The next section will provide guidance around three main
questions:
^
Which channels are performing best?
^
Who is closing the best leads?
^
What does “best” look like?
Determining which channels are performing best is related
to your specific business model and attribution system. As
marketing has become more of a science and less of an art,
we’re finding that attribution systems like first touch and last
touch are not enough to truly explain the buyer’s journey. Now,
we have software like Segment and Clari that can capture
all marketing interactions. Even if the browser was reset, the
interactions are still captured. You can see the full marketing
interactions across the journey and even past the website and
into the product.
However you choose to analyze your data, it’s
important to know which channel is performing
best and who is closing those deals.
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
Chapter 2: Marketing
34
Keep in mind that this will probably change over time. Be
prepared to do this analysis regularly and update your lead
routing accordingly. If you find it takes a lot of manual work to
calculate this, consider re-designing the process and systems
to support automation.
35
Marketing and Sales
On the Same Page
What the sales team calls the best lead versus what marketing
calls the best lead is rarely the same thing. It can even vary
from person to person! To get ahead of this, show the complete
analysis of the best-performing channels to help your team
fine tune their performance. Instead of showing one channel’s
conversion or one person’s conversions, show a combined
analysis. That changes the conversation from fairness of lead
distribution to a discussion about education and improving
conversion rates. If a sales representative consistently
excels at closing leads from webinars, consider having an
enablement person work closely with them. The goal is to
determine if their success can be taught and replicated across
the rest of the sales team or if it’s simply a personal style that
cannot be easily trained.
If the successful approach can be taught, you may want to
set up a training program around it. However, if it’s more of
a personal style, it’s best to accept it as it is and focus on
finding other areas for improvement within the team.
Chapter 2: Marketing
Chapter 2: Marketing
36
37
Company-Wide Investments Included
in the Marketing Plan
Another area that is commonly overlooked is the bigger
investments that are required as the business enters different
stages of growth. For instance, if your company is pivoting into
a PLG motion, there will be significant investment to dial in the
right ICP. Or maybe you’re making a big splash in a new industry
and “the event” each year is $125k, but the revenue for this
segment won’t support such a large expenditure. That’s where
you need a few guiding principles to help facilitate this process:
^
Match business cycle to expenditure
^
Attribution vs. Execution
^
Large Investment / Event Reviews
When a company decides to break into a new portion of the
market, (either going upstream or to a different vertical), the
investment associated with this should be matched to the
expected business cycle.
For example, let’s say your company took 3 years to get
a decent brand presence in the United States and now you’re
launching in a new region. All larger investment expenditures
should be capitalized over the number of years expected to
receive benefit; in this instance, 3 years would be reasonable.
Chapter 2: Marketing
If this guideline is ignored, the marketing budget may get
bloated during the first year of any new company pivot
because the revenue obtained from those expenditures takes
much longer to realize than one year.
PRO TIP
To implement this process, you would
nominate a C-level marketing executive (CMO) to
manage the capital expenditure approval process and
be accountable. Keep in mind that the marketing
plan may take time to gain momentum. Replacing
a marketing team once a year due to the lack
of performance in one area does not match the
performance to the business cycle. Marketing
departments should not be held to the same
monthly or quarterly standard that sales is, but rather
to a yearly or bi-yearly standard to match performance
to business cycle.
Chapter 2: Marketing
38
39
�Remember that
planning is fluid. It is not
a “set it and forget it”
exercise. It is important
that you build your
plan, work it and review
it. Planning is a team
sport. All areas of GTM
drive the impact.”
Mollie Bodensteiner
Go-to-Market Strategy and Operations Leader
Tracking Attribution
for Major Investments
Attribution must be built into big marketing investments,
such as large industry events. When planning a large event,
attribution can get lost in the frenzy of details. It’s not uncommon
for the marketing team to oversee a large event in which a “ton”
of prospects were touched on and business was created, but a
solid attribution program tracking process wasn’t put in place.
In short, execution was chosen over attribution.
This translates into the finance team getting an
incomplete picture and believing that the event
was not successful, which is usually not the case.
From the operational perspective, it’s worth figuring out how
you want to track interactions at larger events. QR codes are
one way to do this. In addition, with OCR on phones, and
voice-to-text translation, there’s no reason why you couldn’t be
talking to people and tracking as much as possible without
a ton of administrative overhead.
For instance, it’s important to know if you are talking to a net
new lead or if a company is currently in your pipeline. The
attributions for those are different (new leads are first touch,
while current leads are technically multi-touch; the first creating
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
Chapter 2: Marketing
40
pipeline, while the latter moves the current pipeline along faster,
increasing velocity).
Without this administrative work, subsequent approvals for
the same event are highly unlikely. While there may be no
relationship between the event and missed sales targets, they
will be viewed through that lens. Your team is better off talking
to less people and having more quality conversations than
a shotgun approach where no attribution is completed and no
tracking or review can be provided.
If the attribution process is laid out and executed
as planned, an event review becomes extremely
easy to compile. It can be used as the business
case for next year’s budget for the same event
41
PRO TIP
The review should include:
^
^
^
the number of new prospects
current pipeline
new customers.
It should answer these questions:
^
^
^
^
How many prospects did you meet that were new?
How many of those turned into meetings?
How many meetings turned into proof of concept or
a full demo?
How many of those turned into customers?
(assuming your company was successful at the
event and attracted the right personas, etc).
On the flip side of pipeline creation:
^
^
Chapter 2: Marketing
How many prospects did you meet that were currently in
the pipeline and how did you accelerate them faster
through the sales stages? (Increasing sales velocity at
events is a key metric for marketing to show value in an
event review.)
Finally, how many customers did you meet and did you
move that customer closer to be an advocate?
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
42
43
Be sure to manage expectations when you will provide this
report back to sales, marketing, customer success and finance.
This depends on the business cycle and you may have to phase
out the presentation if the cycle extends beyond a year.
This process secures the necessary marketing budget in each
year of a plan without removing larger, necessary investments.
PRO TIP
Key Takeaways
When combining best practices, marketing teams should find it
easier to:
^
have the right number of channel managers
^
be able to forecast and diagnose channels
^
secure the appropriate budget to execute each year
Budgeting this way is important because
For instance, if your tracking shows it takes about
marketing programs and events are the most
2 months after an event for a new prospect to show
up in the system as a qualified lead, then you’d only
provide the new prospect portion of the review after
2 months have passed.
common place to cut budget when attempting to
If the sales cycle from qualified to closed
is another 9 months, then you’d use weighted pipeline
values to project revenue until you have 9 months of
closing time to provide the accurate number.
For increasing sales velocity and converting
make an operating plan “work”.
Even so, the plan may mathematically work, but without
matching the business cycle to outcomes, it will fail. This often
prevents marketing teams from having enough staff, programs
or investments each year to provide the leads the sales team
needs to hit their targets.
In fact, we started this chapter by asking: Is marketing producing
enough quality leads?
customers to advocates, this time frame could be
much shorter. That said, make sure that the business
cycle was matched to the business outcomes.
Chapter 2: Marketing
Chapter 2: Marketing
44
Additional resources:
Webinar
Organic Growth Playbook and
the Rise of the “Who” Economy
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Webinar
Your 2023 Content Marketing Playbook
Watch Now
Webinar
Annual Planning for Sales and
Marketing
Watch Now
Article
How to Use AARRR Pirate Metrics
Framework
Read Now
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
46
Using Data in Marketing
Presented by Sigma
47
Understanding the full funnel of each sales rep in their territory,
where the funnel sits, who the pipeline is with, and which
members of the sales team may not be hitting targets, allows
them to strategically invest dollars that will make more impact.
Too many data teams spend time iterating on the data itself
and talking about what went wrong. Our goal is to use real-time
data streams to augment forecasting and make it live versus
static. That helps us spend less time on the actual data and
more time using it to make informed tactical and strategic
decisions going forward.
Don’t be afraid to prioritize engagement metrics that may not
drive immediate revenue. Even if it’s not factored into your
attribution model, metrics like engagement can be a strong
leading indicator of what content is driving interest on different
channels, as well as contribute to brand awareness.
When it comes to driving pipeline for the sales team, marketing
having a holistic view of the business is crucial. Take Field
Marketing for example. It’s best to make this a regional focus so
that field marketers decide how to invest their dollars based on
the needs of their region.
Chapter 2: Marketing
Source: Sigma Computing
Sigma is a cloud-native analytics platform using a spreadsheet-like interface that
empowers business users to collaborate and make data-driven decisions through
self-service business intelligence.
Chapter 2: Marketing
48
49
CHAPTER 3
It wasn’t long ago that companies almost solely
Customer
Success
focused on new sales and did not pay much attention
In this chapter we analyze Customer Success metrics and
best practices.
to customer retention, upselling, and turning customers into
referrals or references. When Salesforce broke the SaaS ceiling
of $1B for the first time in SaaS history, it was not accomplished
with new sales. It was achieved through upsells and finding
customers where mutual extraction of value enhanced the
relationship. This means being ready to lose customers that
you probably shouldn’t have signed and be even more ready
to delight the customers that get tremendous value from your
product or service.
The metric to focus on is Net Revenue Retention
(NRR) and it’s calculated by taking all of the
revenue from a cohorted year and comparing it to
next year’s revenue from those same customers.
Successful SaaS businesses achieve between 115% to 120%
of NRR, because the customers they churn are offset by the
upsell and cross-selling opportunities presented during the year.
Free
Calculator you can use
to find your ceiling
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
Chapter 3: Customer Success
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51
Properly Label Accounts
by Difficulty and Revenue
Balance Client Needs
With Profitability
Labeling accounts by difficulty and revenue is essential during
the prospecting and onboarding process. This allows the
onboarding team to properly prepare the resources needed to
make sure a new customer is onboarded quickly and efficiently,
reducing time to value. While the implementation may be
difficult, once it’s set up the client needs little to no support.
Do it during the buying process, not the onboarding process.
You may find that the difficulty and revenue categories typically
align and splitting this up doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Revenue complexity is based on the amount of work the
account manager or customer success manager will need to
do to keep the client happy. This is usually measured in how
much time it takes to service and upsell a client. If you find this
takes 2 or 3 account managers, then the account coverage
needed would be 2x or 3x depending on the specific needs.
Every account doesn’t need this level of evaluation, but when
a deal is larger or the prospect organization is deeply complex,
then assigning a label early on in the process can potentially
keep a bad customer fit from becoming a customer at all.
Making sure this resourcing is profitable can be tricky because
most clients will need a lot of help to get onboarded and ramp
up adoption across their team. Once that initial period is over,
the needs for the account will be highly specialized and depend
on how many issues pop up in the software or service during
their subscription.
Even so, the best way to tackle this is to calculate
Signing long-term customers that spend more
the Average Cost of Service metric. This allocates
each year is the path to a healthy NRR metric.
all of Customer Success headcount, a portion of
G&A, R&D, Hosting, Software cost to maintain
customers (and a couple other costs depending
on your business).
Chapter 3: Customer Success
Chapter 3: Customer Success
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53
This essentially provides the cost to keep a customer versus
acquire a customer. Using this, you can calculate the payback
period. You can also calculate your lifetime value (LTV)
to customer acquisition cost (CAC) ratio, which forecasts
the amount of profit your company makes from each customer
given acquisition and maintenance cost by using a Gross
Margin estimate.
Bake Your Cross-Sells and Upsells
Into the Account Management Process
Ensuring that cross-sells and upsells are part of your renewal
process is easier said than done.
If you haven’t set a pricing model that is derivative-based,
consider other ways to diversify and increase your average
selling price.
The most straightforward way is to introduce new products and
new functionality, which is the easiest option from a change
management standpoint. You could also implement a different
pricing model, but that could cause major business disruptions
if not executed with great care. Nevertheless, if your company
is selling one product or service with no add-ons from
functions or support, then this lever will prove hard to utilize.
You always want to plan to expand with great customers and
be ready to cut your losses with customers that weren’t a fit.
Design your business and offerings around this and you’ll
achieve a desirable NRR.
Real-Life Example
Make sure to classify your cross-sells or upsells!
To understand best practices, let’s look at Salesforce
again. Their derivative pricing model allows them to
start with a base price of access to the CRM system
or Service cloud. But when you want a full sandbox,
you pay per user and if you want full analytics, you pay
a small amount per user. This allows Salesforce to
constantly grow with their customers, extracting as
much value as they are injecting into organizations.
Many organizations focus on customer acquisition cost alone
and the GTM portion of the business ignores metrics like
payback period. This leads to a huge focus on Expansion and
Cross-Sells being classed as “new sales.” While that drives
down CAC, it usually requires more customer success people
to implement and maintain, so it drives up the average cost of
service. And that drives up the payback period.
Chapter 3: Customer Success
Chapter 3: Customer Success
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55
REMEMBER
Net Promoter Score (NPS) Monitoring
Watch the payback
period closely. You
need to make sure
that the cost to
acquire and maintain
a customer is profitable
in the long run.
NPS has become a central function of CS orgs. It’s how that
team communicates to internal and external stakeholders that
customers are happy. To ensure your NPS strategy is effective,
avoid the following pitfalls.
Measure Different Personas
Differently
Economic buyers, project managers and end users are all different
personas. These different personas reflect the health of different
business areas.
PRO TIP
The economic buyer will be able to provide
feedback on the buying process and all of their
interactions.
The project manager can provide feedback on
the implementation timeline and onboarding.
Finally, the end user can provide feedback on the
product or service itself.
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
Chapter 3: Customer Success
56
Each of these are 3 feedback mechanisms that should provide
data-based insights on pivoting to an improved prospect
or customer experience in 3 unique areas of the business.
All of which will help improve Net Revenue Retention.
Commonly, NPS is sent out to the person(s) who signed the
contract to ask how the implementation went and if they would
recommend the company to a colleague. Usually, the economic
buyer knows if the implementation was succesful but doesn’t
know much about the details.
It’s better to send the NPS survey to the internal
project manager and not the economic buyer.
This will give you a much more accurate assessment of
the implementation. Survey the economic buyer on the sales
and marketing process alone. Check with end users on the
functionality and ease of use of the software.
Chapter 3: Customer Success
57
Find the Right Way and the Right
Time to Measure
Methods of surveying, such as via email or in-app can produce
wildly different results. Economic buyers don’t always log into
the software so email is probably the best way to send a NPS
survey. Admin users are better surveyed through the email as
well as they’re usually busy performing tasks in an app and
interrupting them may cause negative NPS results.
Lastly, when surveying end users in a product,
develop a consistent cadence and get the user’s
consent.
Don’t ask for NPS when they hover over the logout button, as
that’s plain annoying. And don’t ask an end user for NPS if they
haven’t been using the software sufficiently to provide feedback
(this goes for implementation as well; time this for at least
several weeks after the implementation because the first couple
of weeks could go smoothly and then turn out terribly. An early
NPS would not show this).
Chapter 3: Customer Success
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Focus on the Useful Health Scoring
of Each Account
Health scores on accounts are a nebulous topic. Some people
have asked: “Why don’t health metric software companies offer
health scoring out of the box?” The answer to this is quite easy.
It’s your organization’s responsibility to measure
and find buying and churning signals.
It can be as simple as making it easy to cancel as long as
a reason is provided. That reason can be used to improve
processes, teams or systems to avoid churning in the future.
PRO TIP
Consider showing a banner to the customers with
some decent product usage, inviting them to participate in
NPS. The banner could flash on their dashboard and you could
give them the option to ignore it or exit without responding.
This is a much better way to get authentic responses about
your software and avoid bad NPS scores due to intrusive
approaches.
How can you predict when current customers
will churn before they actually go through
the process?
Real-Life Example
This requires setting up tracking in your software
A customer reads an article and then goes back into
their account to make the suggested changes. That
event is logged and a customer success person
reaches out in 24 hours to make sure the customer’s
issue was resolved. Why? Because the tracking
software found that customers who visit a help page
usually churn within 48 hours because they couldn’t
find the solution.
to see what users are doing when they churn. Software like
Segment or HEAP can help narrow this down, but it’s a lot of
work to set up all of the events you’d like to monitor and track.
With this technology, it’s possible to track all events that led to
a customer churn.
Chapter 3: Customer Success
Chapter 3: Customer Success
60
Health metric software is not going to know this or be able to
analyze it to figure it out. To be predictive, your company has to
find the path to a customer buying and churning via software
like Segment. These paths will contribute to the health score you
implement using whichever health scoring software you choose.
If your company is only looking at customer behaviors such as
last login, time logged in, or pages visited, you are far behind
and probably having a hard time fixing churn issues before
they happen. Without predictive churning capabilities, it will be
difficult to save your most valuable accounts. Those accounts
are the path to a healthy NRR and payback period.
61
Operationalize Post Sales
to Optimize NRR
Core to achieving your NRR goals is a well-tuned, post-sale
operation:
A well defined customer journey that takes into
account the following:
^
The customer experience.
The most common focal point for customer journeys (and
the design center for many journey mapping exercises)
is the customer experience. Implementing a journey to
deliver a great experience is about understanding what
the customer’s ideal experience is at each stage of the
journey, looking at the actual experience you’re delivering,
assessing the gaps and then closing those gaps, typically
prioritizing those that will have the largest impact first.
^
Scale.
Instrumenting the journey for scale means ensuring that
you’ve defined the activities, artifacts and owners for every
stage. When your team does a kickoff with a customer, it’s
worth asking:
•
What artifacts do they use?
Chapter 3: Customer Success
Chapter 3: Customer Success
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•
•
•
^
Who prepares those artifacts?
Who delivers them?
What happens to the data they contain?
Value.
It’s impossible to overstate the importance of ongoing
value alignment throughout the journey. The best way to
do this is to create a value framework that clearly defines
the use cases and outcomes that drive your customers to
buy. Then use that framework at every stage of the journey
to align with the customer, ensuring they are bought into
what success looks like, and regularly reporting out on
outcomes.
Staffing models.
You’ll want to build one of these for each of your post-sale
functions: implementation/onboarding, support and customer
success. Having these in place will enable you to calibrate
actual and perceived workload against industry standards.
Reporting for leading indicators of churn, the
most common of which are:
^
Create a way to measure this at each stage of the lifecycle
and then measure against expectation.
^
^
Chapter 3: Customer Success
Stakeholder engagement.
Create ways to track this engagement (e.g. economic buyer
attendance at an EBR, champion attendance at regular checkin meetings) and then measure actual against expectation.
Stakeholder engagement.
Even if you do all of the above perfectly, the lack of
stakeholder engagement is a thread to every renewal
or expansion. Build stakeholder engagement into the
journey, ensuring that the team is engaging, at a minimum,
with the Economic Buyer and the Champion, at regular
intervals (e.g. quarterly and monthly respectively). The value
framework is the ideal artifact to use for these interactions.
Product adoption.
^
Value.
Using your value framework, track the customer’s
implemented use cases and outcomes against what they
stated as their reasons for buying. Delivering at least one
use case/outcome as quickly as possible will dramatically
increase the likelihood of renewal.
Chapter 3: Customer Success
64
Key Takeaways
In this chapter, we focused on labeling a prospect pipeline for
onboarding, resourcing, cross-sells, NPS, and health scores.
With proper governance in place, labeling
prospects according to difficulty in implementation
and/or revenue makes it easier to assign the
necessary resources to support those accounts.
Once you know the projected needs for support, it’s easy to
determine if the customer will be profitable in the long run and
be a candidate to continually increase your NRR. If you can’t
increase your average selling price through upsells or crosssells, continuing to improve your retained revenue becomes
almost an impossible task. The SaaS ceiling quickly limits your
organization to a specific level of growth.
65
Lastly, make it easy to cancel and ask clients why they are
canceling. This is a good way to start creating a feedback
mechanism for churned customers. For current customers,
producing a predictive health score for your clients is imperative
to prevent churn before it happens and therefore key to keeping
NRR high. It also helps your team determine which customers
are a bad fit.
When you use data-based insights (versus a gut
feeling) to know it’s time to part ways to focus
on more profitable clients, you find the decision
to be logic-based and focused on NRR. All of
these methods will help increase NRR without
sacrificing the prospect journey or customer
experience.
NPS is a great measure for customer feedback,
but it needs to be segregated to provide different
areas of the business proper feedback to improve.
Chapter 3: Customer Success
Chapter 3: Customer Success
66
Additional resources:
Article
Revenue Objectives
of Customer Success
Read Now
Article
How to Build a Customer-Centric
Sales Culture
Read Now
Webinar
How to Rebuild and Thrive after RIFs?
Watch Now
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
68
69
The other key is combining historical data on high growth as
well as “at risk” or churned accounts. That helps us identify
patterns to better highlight clients at risk.
A Holistic Data-Driven View
of Customer Health
Presented by Sigma
For data-driven customer success, you want to understand
who is using what features, and what’s the next most likely
feature that either keeps them retained or makes them willing
to buy more. And buy more either means a higher-level license,
or that they’ve extended access to another person who might
want a license. It’s all about product telemetry.
There is no one data point that highlights a customer’s health.
At Sigma, we look at license utilization, stickiness through DAU
vs. MAU, client engagement, feature adoption, and account
team sentiment. We can combine all of these data elements
into a single table for a complete view of the customer’s health.
Each of the data points that we capture tells a different story.
The combination of qualitative and quantitive data allows us to
build a complete profile of an account. By reviewing individual
areas of risk, we can focus efforts to strengthen accounts and
minimize churn.
Chapter 3: Customer Success
Source: Sigma Computing
Sigma is a cloud-native analytics platform using a spreadsheet-like interface that
empowers business users to collaborate and make data-driven decisions through
self-service business intelligence.
Chapter 3: Customer Success
70
71
CHAPTER 4
You now have a good understanding of pre-sales,
Tying it all
Together
sales, marketing, and customer success and how
each department can achieve sustained and efficient growth.
All of these departments contribute to the overall Go To Market
efforts in the company. They are measured using metrics such as:
^
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
^
Payback Period
^
Lifetime Value (LTV)
^
Magic Ratio
Let’s dive into each metric and cover best practices.
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
Chapter 4: Tying it all Together
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73
Customer Acquisition Cost
Payback Period
Customer Acquisition Cost or CAC is the entire
CFO and finance staff are quite familiar with the payback period
metric, but it’s commonly overlooked in the Go To Market function.
cost of sales and marketing needed to acquire
one new customer.
This includes software, pre-sales, events, and anything related
to sales and marketing. This includes the cost of sales and
marketing staff, marketing programs, and software to keep
track of acquiring customers. Activities and functions such
as research and development and general and administrative
expenses are not part of this cost.
It measures the number of months it takes to recoup the funds
expended to acquire a customer or to reach a break-even point.
Revenues collected after the payback period are mostly profit
minus the average cost to service the client.
This is where the payback period is superior
to CAC: it includes all the cost to maintain and
service a customer.
CAC is a useful metric because it can tell you how much it
costs to merely acquire a customer, which is the first part of the
overall picture of profitability.
CAC
Chapter 4: Tying it all Together
Total expenses
to acquire customers
Total #
of customers acquired
Specifically, this means the salaries and bonuses of customer
success representatives are allocated to this metric.
Payback
Period
CAC
(MRR – ACS)
Chapter 4: Tying it all Together
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75
The payback period also includes the cost of software to
maintain customers (e.g. Gainsight and Service Cloud),
a portion of research and development (R&D) and general and
administrative (G&A) expenses that are required to maintain
those customers. For R&D it’s a portion of time spent on bug
fixes. For G&A, it’s the portion of time spent billing, collecting,
and otherwise assisting current customers. When all of these
costs are included, the organization now knows how long they
need to keep a customer before they can be profitable.
Lifetime Value (LTV)
The lifetime value or LTV of a customer is usually
estimated using renewal rate and gross margin in
the business.
While this is a good directional value, there needs to be more
fidelity for this to be a useful metric for data-driven insights.
PRO TIP
Each onboarded customer should belong to
a cohort and each cohort should be tracked for CAC,
LTV, and Payback period. This allows the business to
remove lifetime value estimate, calculate the actuals,
and sum the actuals together by cohort.
Chapter 4: Tying it all Together
LTV
ARPU
Revenue
or Customer Churn
Chapter 4: Tying it all Together
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77
Magic Ratio
The last metric we’ll touch on is the magic ratio, which
includes all sales and marketing costs as a ratio. It indicates
the company’s operational efficiency and long-term sales and
marketing sustainability.
Magic Ratio is calculated by determining the amount of annual recurring revenue increase generated
for each dollar spent on sales and marketing.
So, it’s essentially the contribution margin created by your
GTM machine.
If the margin is more than 1, then anything over 1 is going into
the expenses or profits of the business. Anything under 1 is
burning more cash than it creates.
Real-Life Example
It’s typical to see annual plans with the first year below
1, but in years 2 and 3, the plan should be growing well
above the 1 mark, and hopefully $1 the organization
puts into sales and marketing, the company receives
$3 in revenue.
Chapter 4: Tying it all Together
With these metrics laid out, it is easy to see which areas of
the business need more analysis and investigation.
If CAC is too high, you’ll want to analyze all of
your sales and marketing costs.
This includes salaries, commissions, marketing programs,
and events. When you study the costs, you can see where the
inefficiency is coming from, recommend changes, and continue
to measure CAC until it decreases.
You’ll also want to make sure that the payback period is not
extending due to unforeseen maintenance costs. Lowering CAC,
but increasing payback period by roughly the same amount will
not improve GTM engine efficiency; it will just shift the metrics
from one area to another. In this case, start looking for ways to
cut costs on the maintenance side from customer success staff,
development costs from bug fixes, and bespoke improvements
that are being made for possibly just one customer.
The balance between CAC and payback period is not always
straightforward. For example, a new customer expansion
program may be implemented by customer success, but
allocated to new sales. This lowers CAC, but increases
payback period by increasing the average cost of service via
the increased labor from the customer success team.
Chapter 4: Tying it all Together
78
This is a common occurrence as many Go To Market
organizations focus on CAC and not payback period.
You can use an average calculation formula to determine overall
LTV to help you understand which customers are providing
the most value and which customers are being lost quickly.
Be sure to track each customer cohort separately. Narrowing
churn down to customer cohorts allows for much more rapid
discovery of issues that caused churn. It also allows you to
diagnose churn issues in that group and match them to the time
period. Then you can investigate what was happening during
this time (e.g. software changes, market conditions) that would
cause a customer to churn. Quickly applying improvements to
keep other members from that cohort or similar cohorts paves
the path for predictive prevention of churn.
As mentioned earlier, the magic ratio is a quick
look at the contribution the sales and marketing
teams are making to the rest of the company.
The goal is to get the ratio above 1 and to work
toward a target of 3 and above.
Naturally, this is a rough estimate based on SaaS businesses
and can be misleading if the other parts of the business are not
run as efficiently as sales and marketing.
Chapter 4: Tying it all Together
79
For instance, a company may have a very healthy magic
ratio of 4, (i.e. for every $1 spent in sales and marketing,
the company receives $4 dollars in revenue). This same
company may also have a large development team that
is oversized and overpaid. When all the money is collected,
the business is operating at a loss, but not due to sales
and marketing.
The magic ratio metric allows the business
to quickly see if the new sales and marketing
engine is running efficiently enough to keep the
lights on. In other words, it’s not a very insightful
metric when looked at in a silo.
Key Takeaways
Reducing CAC while lowering payback period and extending
LTV of a customer is a very reliable way to sustainably
and efficiently grow your business. Keeping an eye on
the magic ratio allows you to shift resources and priorities.
When each metric is paired with insights, you get diagnostic
criteria that serves as a roadmap on where to implement
changes for improvement.
Chapter 4: Tying it all Together
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81
Conclusion
As we all know, plans do not always unfold exactly as we
expected. That’s why the ability to track, measure, interpret and
act on data-based insights is critical to running a successful
SaaS business. Metrics are only the first step, but this series
has outlined:
^
Three areas of GTM (Presales/Sales, Marketing,
Customer Success)
^
The main drivers for each department
^
The metrics those drivers improve
^
Tying those metrics together.
Once tied together, these metrics provide powerful insights to
keep your business growing sustainably and efficiently.
Happy Annual Planning!
Chapter 4: Tying it all Together
82
Improving the Payback
Period Metric
Presented by Sigma
83
By doing that we do two things: allocate budget to the bestperforming and most efficient channels, while also driving the
top line. The goal is finding the least expensive route to find
the most interested customers — and then execute the highest
converting methods. If you do that right, it means the customer
you found is most likely to complete an engagement with you.
One of the biggest levers you can focus on that will drive the
business forward is shortening the payback period — the
time a customer has to be with you to pay back the sales and
marketing costs of acquiring that customer. At Sigma we set
and achieved a goal to cut our payback period by 33% in five
months. Here’s why:
The cost of sales and marketing increases disproportionately to
every other cost in a business as it grows. Because that line item
is the one that will always increase as company growth continues,
investors want to see if you can make efficiency improvements
there, which reflect your ability to do so in other areas.
To drive efficiency, we look at the top-performing channels and
their efficiency gains over time — and then allocate budget
accordingly. We also take a forecast-driven approach, rather
than the more typical flat budgeting allocation method.
Chapter 4: Tying it all Together
Source: Sigma Computing
Sigma is a cloud-native analytics platform using a spreadsheet-like interface that
empowers business users to collaborate and make data-driven decisions through
self-service business intelligence.
Chapter 4: Tying it all Together
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who are collaborating
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About RevGenius
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Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
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87
Contributors
GTM Harmony delivers Harmonize: SaaS service
designed to assist Founders, CEOs, and GTM leaders
by providing them with the vital GTM metrics they need
to make informed decisions.
After an initial consultation to understand their current
state and goals, our software integrates into their CRM,
pulling actual data and recalculating models monthly to
ensure up-to-date and accurate projections.
Sigma is a cloud-native analytics platform using
a spreadsheet-like interface that empowers business
users to collaborate and make data-driven decisions
through self-service business intelligence. Sigma
requires no code or special training to augment with
new data, perform “what-if” analysis in real-time,
and answer natural language questions.
Through the modern intelligence cloud, at Sigma we
empower everyone to data confidently.
Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales
Contributors
88
89
David Maxey
[Author]
Diane Gordon
[Contributor]
Senior consultant, GTM Strategy Consulting
Founder and CEO, Customer Growth Consulting
David is the head of Revenue Operations for the
Americas at XM Cyber and is also a senior consultant
The founder and CEO of Customer Growth
Consulting, a consulting firm offering fractional CCO
and advisory services to SaaS B2B enterprises.
Experiences in building and leading SaaS company
post-sales teams (Implementation, Professional
Services, Customer Success Management, and
Support) that deliver best in class gross revenue
retention (GRR) and net revenue retention (NRR).
Linkedin profile
at GTM Strategy Consulting, where he helps
executives in SaaS businesses from 20-150 MM in
revenue to optimize their go-to-market strategy and
operations. With over 10 years of experience in global
sales, customer success, marketing, and finance, he
has a holistic and data-driven approach to solving
complex business challenges and driving growth.
Linkedin profile
Lisa Kelly
[Contributor]
Joanna Kasprzak-Kajder
[Managing editor]
SaaS Revenue Operations Executive
Head of Owned Media, RevGenius
Operations Executive with a demonstrated history of
working in multiple industries in SaaS. Skilled
in a variety of areas including Operations, Sales,
Leadership, Data Analysis, Account Management,
Business Intelligence and Process Optimization.
Linkedin profile
Head of Owned Media at RevGenius, overseeing
the content strategy and execution for all the owned
channels, including the website, blog, newsletter,
social media, and online events.
Linkedin profile
Contributors
Contributors
90
91
Liza Cichowski
[Editor]
Fractional Product Marketer, Last Word MKTG
Liza is a product marketing consultant who helps
SaaS companies create and manage marketing
programs from the ground up. From overseeing
product launches to creating sales enablement
programs, Liza is a reliable resource to marketing
departments that need leadership and support.
Liza has 20 years of marketing experience and has
worked with a myriad of startups and enterprise
companies to accelerate their go-to-market initiatives.
Linkedin profile
Contributors
Contributors
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Chapter 1: Sales and Pre-Sales